The study of booze with Camper English.

molecular mixology

For CLASS Magazine/DiffordsGuide.com, I interviewed Jeff Josenhans of San Diego's US Grant Hotel. He's been quietly doing pretty cool stuff over there. He implemented one of the first cocktail herb gardens, has barrel aged cocktails that he is able to sell commercially, and now features the "Cocktails Sur Lie" program. Cocktail ingredients (minus the base spirit) are fermented like wine, then put into champagne bottles and fermented a second time like champagne. Then they pop off the caps to get rid of the yeast and add base spirit in the 'dosage' step. As he partnered with a winery production center,...
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The Fizzy Mary combines the enriching vegetables and hair-of-the-dog booziness of the typical Bloody Mary with stomach-soothing fizz created by Nitrous Oxide. The drink has a wonderful tingle on the lips and better yet, the nitrous bubbles will go right to your head. After a few experiments I found I liked the Fizzy Mary best charged with whipped cream canisters (nitrous charges), while the garnish I preferred carbonated (soda chargers). I ended up using the Perlini cocktail carbonating system for the liquid and the iSi whipped cream canister for the garnishes, but there’s no reason you couldn’t use one tool...
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In my latest post for Details.com, I talk about the Negroni. That poor cocktail is less famous than the Martini and Manhattan, yet suffers more at the hand of bartenders. "Everywhere you look, the Negroni is being deconstructed, smoked, solidified, gelatinized, flamed, dehydrated, foamed, carbonated, frozen, clarified, and subjected to other forms of mixological torture." The story then goes on to describe some bars in which the Negroni is currently being tortured. Check it out on Details.com! Smoky Negroni at Hakkasan
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I have a story about smoke cocktails in this Sunday's LA Times Magazine. Go read it! PHOTO: BARTHOLOMEW COOKE Now, you're saying, "Didn't I already read that?" Nope, that would be Robert Simonson's excellent story in the New York Times, which I learned about after mine had already been submitted. We cover pretty much the same material, referencing many of the same people and even including one of the same recipes! Compare and contrast. My story includes recipes by Tim Zohn and Ethan Terry of AQ, San Francisco, Giovanni Martinez of Sadie, Los Angeles, Michael Callahan of 28 HongKong Street,...
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I know that several people are attempting bottle-fermented cocktails. Here's one program from Jeff Josenhans at the US Grant Hotel in San Diego that's about to come online. THE US GRANT's award-winning Mixologist, Jeff Josenhans, has taken his mad-scientist cocktail crafting skills to a new level: straight to the basement of the hotel. After many hours of experimenting with various bottling processes, Josenhans is the first mixologist to successfully craft bottle conditioned cocktails combining the beer and champagne method of fermentation. Launching as "Cocktails Sur Lie," (Sur lie is a French wine-making term that means having been rested on its...
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The next step in the Solid Liquids project is to look at the various methods people are using to dehydrate liqueurs down to sugars. After searching the interwebz, here are some techniques I found. I don't think the original DrinkBoy forums are online anymore- at least I can't find them- but that's where this technique first came to my attention several years ago. Bartenders in Australia were dehydrating Campari and other liqueurs and making powders out of them. Oven Baking Pour the liqueur on a baking pan, perhaps with a silicone matt on it (for easier removal of solids) and...
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I wrote up this blog post over at Tales Blog about one of my favorite talks at this year's Tales of the Cocktail, The Molecular DNA of Classic Cocktails. It was a great talk about how drinks like the Ramos Gin Fizz, Blue Blazer, and Clover Club are all classic cocktails that played with format and presentation, analogous to today's gelatinous drinks and foams.
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New Booze is a sub-blog of Alcademics. Posts are announcements of new liquor (and occasionally other cocktail-related products) hitting the market.
All information comes from press releases and are not reviews!